Art: Swedish Objects

Not many U. S. citizens know that the Delaware Bay region was colonized by Sweden nearly 40 years before the pious arrival of long-haired William Penn. In 1638 Sweden’s Mayflower, the Kalmar Nyckel, put colonists ashore at what is now known as The Rocks, near the site of the present city of Wilmington. The settlement, named Christina in honor of Sweden’s young queen, scarcely got started before it was lost to the Dutch and then to the English. As the prelude to a tercentenary celebration of New Sweden next year, an exhibition of Swedish art opened last week at the International Building in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center.

Sweden is known to contemporary artists principally for its sculpture, which Carl Milles has made world-famed, and for the beautiful work in glass, silver and furniture fostered by the Swedish Association of Arts & Crafts under renowned Dr. Gregor Paulsson and his successor, Dr. Ake Stavenow. Last spring a committee, including the Worcester Museum’s rotund Director Francis Henry Taylor and Russell A. Plimpton, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, decided to pass up sculpture, try to assemble for U. S. showings a selection of old, not new, Swedish handicrafts. Bright, tactful Mr. Plimpton spent the summer in Sweden prying from Swedish museums objects that had not been out of the country—nor in many cases, out of the cellar—in centuries.

Most interesting to gallery-goers last week was a roomful of Viking art. How capable Swedish craftsmen had become, thousands of years before the first Viking art keel to cold water, was demonstrated by several shapely, streamlined, finely ornamented axheads of the early Bronze Age. The spiral designs chased on them appeared also on brooches, bracelets, rings, spearheads of the 8th to 11th Centuries A.D. In a glass case all by itself was a Viking drinking horn of heroic capacity, as long as a man’s arm, carved from a single piece of wood in the time of Leif Ericsson.

Instructive but comparatively tame were the 18th and 19th-Century paintings which Director Plimpton and Stockholm’s National Museum Curator Sixten Strömbom had included. Discreetly confined to historical art, the show stopped with such established fin de siècle cosmopolitans as Anders Zorn. Ernst Josephson, contained no work by such up-&-coming young Swedish painters as Ewald Dahlskog and Leander Engström.